Month: June 2016

Essays are sought for an edited collection focused on the life and work of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, to be submitted to the University of Georgia Press. As surprising as it may seem given Hopkins’s significance as novelist, editor, and public intellectual, the only collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to her is John Gruesser’ s important collection, The Unruly Voice (1996). Since then, however, there has been a steady and increasing stream of interest in Hopkins’s work on The Colored American Magazine and her four novels. Moreover, very recent essays and a paper presentation have revealed that Of One Blood, Winona and Hagar’s Daughter employ verbatim passages along with character and plot structures from dozens of popular texts, constituting about 20% of each novel (Sanborn 2015, Pavletich 2016, Dembowitz 2016). This new research has barely begun to address the multitude of questions raised by the new knowledge. For example, what are the various and specific effects of this compositional strategy? Given that her appropriations could have caused her serious problems if made public, what might have impelled her decisions? Is Contending Forces composed in a similar fashion? Lois Brown (2008) observes that Hopkins also “manipulated her genealogy for dramatic effect. She merged her maternal family lines [and] blurred her actual relationship to [her] forefathers.” Hopkins’s plagiaristic practice may go beyond textual construction and include a self-conscious construction of identity that has not yet been explored. Finally, in light of the news that William Wells Brown employed a very similar writing practice appropriating “at least 87,000 words from at least 282 texts” (Sanborn 2016), how might we need to re-evaluate nineteenth-century African American intertextuality?Continue reading →

Border Crossings:Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific

Society for the Study of American Women Writers & Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Dates: 5th – 8th July 2017

Venue: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France

Conference director: Stéphanie Durrans

To maintain a continuity with our previous conference (in Philadelphia, November 2015) on liminality and hybrid lives, we would like this first SSAWW conference in Europe to address the significance of “border crossing[s]” in the lives and works of American women writers. Such experiences have always been important to American women. Early diaries and travel notes left by 17th– and 18th-century women provide us with valuable records of and about their migratory experience to the New World and their lives and experiences in America. Besides offering more records of such experiences, the 19th century also witnessed an explosion in travel writing, fiction, and poetry treating with travel, as growing numbers of American women writers could afford to travel across Europe and more widely. Throughout the 20th century, more American women writers found in foreign lands a source of inspiration and creativity (e.g. Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, and Djuna Barnes in France, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Katherine Anne Porter in Mexico) and some of them even made the choice to write from abroad. Meanwhile, women writers originating from other countries drew on their first-hand experience of migration, border-crossing, and uprooting to add to the growing canon of American literature (e.g. Jumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Shirley Geok-lin Lim). No study of border-crossing can afford to neglect the rich mine of writing contributed by Chicana writers throughout the 20th century. As pointed out by Carmen Tafolla, “[Chicanos] did not cross the border; the border crossed [them].” This was also true of many other women, moving into or across America. From such a perspective, crossing borders lends itself to the most radical strategies of subversion and defamiliarization. Last but not least, such writers as Toni Morrison explored the darker side of border-crossing by seeking to express and represent the trauma of the Middle Passage for whole generations of Africans, and the multiple dilemmas facing African American women down the decades.

The conference theme invites participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by such cross-cultural interactions, as well as the challenge consequently posed to literary canons. How has this experience affected women writers’ worldview and conception of language? To what extent do their modes of exploration differ from that of their male counterparts? How important were such contacts in allowing women writers to develop a consciousness of otherness and/or forge a community of feeling and experience transcending national and/or cultural barriers? “Chroniclers bind the inner and outward history of isolated humanity, but travellers connect all humanity together,” stated Grace King in one of the first entries to her diary. More often than not, indeed, geographical borders assume an ontological dimension, and crossing them amounts to an exploration of the self as much as to a confrontation with otherness. Crossings have always involved a necessary stage of transition, transformation, and consequent redefinition of the self that questions the very stability and permanence traditionally associated with women’s conventionalized roles. Thus we are very happy to consider writers using the idea of border crossing and travel symbolically or metaphorically as well as literally: early female travellers, explorers, and adventurers crossed borders in more ways than one, often by transgressing gender expectations, using this experience or awareness to reshape the conventions of many genres. One might also approach the topic by focusing on what happens when literary works cross national borders to reach foreign readers in translation. In this respect, translation studies and studies of American women writers’ reception abroad constitute another potentially fruitful arena.

As a multiethnic, multilingual society, the U.S. undoubtedly provides fertile terrain for the development of a transnational consciousness that will be pivotal to our questioning on the topic. Possible approaches to the conference theme may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:

Women writers and travel writing

The migratory experience

Expatriate American women writers

Expatriate women writers in Paris

The Lost Generation

Redefining the national canon

Transnationalism

Transatlantic studies

Transcontinental/Transpacific/Transatlantic literary relationships

Geographical borders/ontological issues

Representations of otherness

Cross-cultural interactions

Cross-linguistic perceptions/living between two languages

Women and frontier experiences

Translation studies

American women writers’ reception in foreign countries

Women writers’ reception in America and Europe

Submission InstructionsDeadline: August 31, 2016 (Individual Papers)

Submissions are electronic. Submit individual proposals and completed panel proposals to ssaww2017.bordeaux.montaigne@gmail.com both attached in Word or rtf, and pasted into the body of the message.

The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. Affiliate associations and regional groups should follow the submission guidelines for complete session submissions.

Conference participants may appear on the program twice as presenters: once on a panel presenting a formal academic paper, and once in an additional way (for example, on a roundtable, as a respondent, or in a “professionalization” session).

Complete Panel Submission Guidelines-Deadline 30 June 2016

The cfp for complete panel submissions can be posted on the SSAWW website in addition to other venues of your choice. For posting on the SSAWW website, please send cfp to ssaww.web@gmail.com.

Complete sessions may take the form of panels or roundtables. A panel normally consists of three, preferably four presenters, who speak for approximately 15 minutes each with 15 minutes left for discussion. Roundtables consist of five or more participants who speak briefly (6-8 minutes), and emphasize discussion among themselves and with the audience.

The organizers welcome variations on and innovations in format within the allotted time frames. If you are proposing a different format for a complete session, please explain the format clearly, and state the rationale and benefits.

If submitting a complete session, please ensure that notifications go out by the end of June at the latest to those whose proposals are declined for the particular panel so that they can still submit individual paper abstracts by the conference submission deadline of August 31.

Email Header: Please put 1) “Complete Session” in the subject line, followed by a brief title (one to five words); 2) OR the name of the affiliate association; 3) OR the name of the regional group

Please include the following information for complete session proposals in the body of the email, as well as attached in Word or rtf.

Adapting the guidelines set out by the American Literature Association which facilitates the copying of accepted submissions directly into the program, we ask that you provide a summary of the panel information at the beginning of the submission in the following format, listing the session title, the chair and affiliation (if any), the organizer (if different from the chair), and affiliate association/group name (if any), and each of the presenters, citing name, affiliation (if any), and title of paper in quotation marks. Please turn off auto format to prevent automatic indenting. Commas separate the name, affiliation, and title, and there is no period at the end. Here is an example:

Gender and Print Culture
Chair: Mary Smith, Nu University
Organized by the North American Society of Women Scholars of Print Culture

Contact person’s name and contact information: email and phone (to be used only if email fails)

Title of session

Type of session: please indicate if this is a panel or roundtable, or please explain if you are proposing an alternate format

Chair: name and affiliation (if any)

Brief biography (60 word limit)

Organizer’s name and affiliation (if any), and brief biography (60 word limit) if different from the Chair; or if the session is being organized by an affiliate association or regional group, please provide its name here

Scholars in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies have long been self-reflexive about what it means to become institutionalized within the academy. Feminist Studies articles have charted this institutionalization throughout the history of the field, and especially when doctoral programs were inaugurated in several universities. More than fifteen years after our journal published two important collections of writing–a 2001 special forum on interdisciplinarity and a 1998 special issue on women’s studies in the academy–we plan to revisit the state of the field with respect to doctoral degrees. Continue reading →

Second International Conference of the Intercontinental Crosscurrents Network

The Dynamics of Power: Inclusion and Exclusion in Women’s Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century

Venue: Institute of Arts and Humanities, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Date: Nov. 3 – 5, 2016

Convener: Department of English and North-American Studies (DEINA) and the Centre for Humanistic Studies (CEHUM)

Call for papers

Networks are structures of relation, alignment, assembly, and linkage, however loose and asymmetrical their construction. They seem, first of all, combinative, their “work” deriving from or yielding to a common purpose or unifying theme. Along these lines, networks constitute structures of support or specific forms of exchange and solidarity, in essence bringing relations into being that can begin to exist across the norms and epistemologies of the status quo. Continue reading →

Seeking papers for the following panel to be proposed for the SSAWW conference in July 2017 in Bordeaux

Deadline: June 25, 2016

In recent years, a number of recovered texts have brought female characters and authors into conversations about transatlantic and transpacific movements in general, and about islands in particular. From the anonymously authored The Female American (1767) and The Woman of Colour (1808) to Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808), such texts have instigated conversations about gender, race, and ethnicity in relation to maritime and island settings. This panel seeks to re-theorize island spaces, whether Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, or other spaces, and island narratives, through a focus on female travelers or writers across periods. From “female Crusoes” to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “remote and islanded” characters, how might reading islands as specific sites of border crossings and contacts shift our understanding of island and archipelagic settings and narratives in a way that also reconfigures recent attention to the oceanic?

Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School invites applications for a one-year visiting position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literary Studies with a start date of Fall 2016. Lang’s Literary Studies curriculum features discussion-based seminars that consider the written word from both critical and creative perspectives. Faculty utilize innovative methods to discover breadth and depth in texts, in writing assignments, and in the field as a whole.

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers solicits proposals for a guaranteed panel at the SSAWW conference in Bordeaux, France, July 5-8, 2017. Extending the conference CFP, with its keywords such as “transnationalism,” “translation,” and “transatlantic,” we add the term “transgender.” Concepts of movement and transition are central to transgender studies: what might this field add to discussions of “Border Crossings”? How might we think about trans/genderqueer/gender nonconforming authors, characters, and texts as crossing and re-crossing geographic and symbolic borders? And how might the borders that prevail in the study of “American women writers” be altered by a consideration of texts by and about transgender women and/or individuals who identify outside of the gender binary?

This Legacy-sponsored panel particularly welcomes papers that explore such questions in work prior to 1940 but will consider submissions on writers from any time period. We solicit papers on a range of genres under the umbrella of cultural production, including the visual arts.

Send your 250-word abstract to Jennifer Putzi at jlputz@wm.edu by June 25, 2016.